American By Birth, Southern Because My Mom Was Stupid Enough To Marry My Father

James Joyner, Outside The Beltway, has a post up "American By Birth, Southern By The Grace Of God", that goes on to extol the virtues southerners and the southern way of life.

Despite the fact that I’ve never skinned a buck or run a trout line (nor chewed Beechnut, let alone had any desire to spit it in some dude’s eyes) there’s an undeniable appeal to the pride and raw emotion of the sentiments. And while it’s undeniably exclusionary — one can’t have an Us without a Them, after all– it’s decidedly not geographical but cultural.

Kevin Drum hit on the theme that southerners have a victim complex and will only vote for other southerners.

I can't begin to tell you how tired I am of the South's victim complex. Five of our last seven presidents have been from the South and the other two have been from the Southwest — and the reason, as near as I can tell, is that most Southerners just flatly refuse to vote for anyone who comes from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And yet, somehow, it's the rest of us who are supposedly intolerant of Southern culture. Feh.

Joyner goes on further that it's about culture and a sharing of common values.

It’s not that Southerners will only vote for a guy who sounds like them. Reagan, Bush 41, and Nixon didn’t. It’s about values. As the bumper sticker puts it, God, Guts, and Guns. Northerners who can talk to people in those terms have a good shot at getting Southern and rural votes.

Well, speaking as a southerner who has caught and cleaned fish and killed and skinned a buck it doesn't endow you with any special American-ness. Southerners have no more sense of values than anyone else. We have no more values than anyone else. Southerners still think that car racing is a sport, and that the civil war was fought over states rights. Those two things should tell you something. They can be just as rude, uncouth and stupid as anyone else. To say that a group of people or for a group of people to claim that they are more special because of where they live is to believe the lies told by the media and to accept the republican's southern strategy. It's all bullshit.

Kevin Drum got it right, kind of. So did James Joyner, kind of. Southerners think they're special because people keep telling them they are. They sure didn't do anything to deserve it.

As to the title, my mom met my dad at a naval hospital in Connecticut where she was stationed as a nurse during WWII. I'm southern born, but only half southern bred.


Jim Martin